Entries Tagged 'TechTips' ↓

By default, PowerPoint enters a new bullet every time you press Enter, as long as you’re using the bulleted list format. Fortunately, you’re not stuck. Hold down the Shift key and press Enter to insert a soft return. This will drop the insertion point to the next line without adding a new bullet

To add guides to a slide to help you line up objects just right-click on the slide and choose grid and guidelines from the context menu, check Display Drawing Guide On Screen and click OK.  By default there are only two guides but you can click a guide and move it. If you need more guides press control and drag a guide.  Instead of moving the guide to a new position, Powerpoint generates a new guide.

To create a summary slide with links to go back to specific places in the document, list the slides on the summary slide.  Select a list item and choose insert hyperlink.  Click place in this document.  Choose the slide.  Click OK.  You could use the same process to create a table of contents at the beginning if you prefer.

Students frequently ask me how to insert a sound and make it play for more than one slide.  Here is how to do it in ten steps.  This assumes that you have already found a sound and saved it somewhere on your computer. This is in Office 2003

1. Navigate to the slide where you want your sound to begin playing.
2. Go to Insert>Movies and sounds>Sound from file
3. Navigate to your sound file
4. Click OK
5. Click Automatically
6. Go to Slide Show>Custom Animation (your sound file should be listed)
7. In the drop down list next to  your sound click the effect options. Play sound, Effect tab
8. Click the radio button beside stop playing after (Here there is a drop down box where you can choose the number) slides
9. In Timing tab - to play automatically you can set to start after previous with a 0 second delay
10. Go to sound settings and adjust the volume

Done!

 Cross posted at Thoughts Have wings

10 Fun Photoshop lessons
cs3 used
Daniel O’Kilen
http://divshare.com/download/6467229-584
all lessons handouts on website
create a miniature environment

lesson plan
TEKS objectives step by step procedure and extension lessons

rubrik contains list of tools student learned during that assignment - final product does not have to look like the teachers
10 lessons
creating miniature environment
taking ordinary photograph and use gradient tool and selection creation and quickmask to choose central portion of image
use lens blur, inverted, hue and saturation, tweaking colors makes it look like made out of plastic
His example was taj mahal but students can find their own image

winterizing an image
take photo and using quickmask - creating selection from it - selected grass in photo and manipulated hue and saturation, channel and lighten in channel mixer to create snow-like effect

creating a silhouette vase
start with profile photo quickmask select duplicate and flip - makes a vase effect
tweak pattern, shadow

Building a photo montage
take photo and use pattern to fill the image
select out part of image to use, crop using width and height settings
using other photos make tiny thumbnail - create pattern, adjust and desaturate to use colors from original image to make a fill
apply to original photo as overlay or softlight

Creating Old Movie Effect
can create animation in photoshop
using old photo, apply grain filter, stretched out vertically
create several layers using different grains to get different line patterns
in animation you use the frames you created
animation timeline
can clone out a person adn clone stamp character back in to make it look like character is walking across the screen
creates avi or gif

Creating a Planet
longer lesson
using satellite photo
select part, sphere it
emboss gives more texture
apply vivid light blending mode
create clouds, difference clouds
using brush, paint shadow on planet
inner glow for atmosphere reflection
place on starfield background

Colorize Black and White Photo
Selection and lasso tools
Magic Wand and quickmask
point of lesson was the three main ways to select
magic wand used for areas with strong contrast - learn about tolerance settings
fine tune selection with lasso - excellent detail work practice
magnetic lasso tool
drag color slider to get colors you want
can use same process to colorize a part of a photo for emphasis

Creating a Stone Texture From Nothing
render some clouds, add noise
work with channels
add fade
lighting effects
tweak brightness and contrast, then students learn to create a layer and emboss to carve their name into the rock

Creating an Underwater City
Use photo of a city
Covers most of the tools including paths with pen tool
use pen tool to select sky
edit gradient tool to make sky look like water - add hue and saturation, noise, particulate matter
took brush and added moss and plants on buildings
use smudge tool to add plants to the roof
they create a fish brush from photo to add fish to the image
add white lines and blur to make some ripples
grass brush to make seaweed - use flipping layers and warp tool
Shear tool
make bubbles, zoom in to add bubbles, make bubble, add shark from photo

Creating an alien
using photo of person
select circle, bloat
distorts the face
use pucker tool
bloat eyes
warp tool - liquify window
drag parts of face around
select using quickmask - edit hue and sat to turn him green
select eyes - up contrast, down brightness
marquis tool and shear to make a tail

 Cross posted at Thoughts Have Wings

I actually didn’t stay for all of this because there was a conflict with another presentation I wanted to see.  I was hoping for a reason to like SecondLife but I still have difficulty with seeing how it is useful.  It gets boring to me very quickly and there is also the problem of people all over the world being in the virtual world and no way to filter the content.

You basically sign up for a free account, choose a basic character and one improvement that I saw was that you can designate an interest from the start.  You can then tweak your avatar (or character) by changing the body shape, face, hair, clothes and make it more personalized.

Jamey Osborne
LaPorte isd
Jamey Sismondi in sl
jamey.sismondi@gmail.com
osbornej@lpisd.org

go online and be in a virtual world
not mission based like video games usually are
like first life - do whatever you want
presentation is to shorten the learning curve
wear a thick skin in second life
things can happen that will offend you, crazy weird things walk away
virtual world that has people from all over the world in it.
can be an intensely absorbing experience
you login and say you will on for ten minutes and three hours later…

secondlife.com
owning land costs money

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Abitibi/228/113/39
(slurl is a link to a location in secondlife)
secondlife about the size of boston (they say)
there are live concerts
each square represents a server somewhere  sim or region
parcels are sims broken down
you can buy those premium account 77 dollars a year
the more land you buy you have to acquire land tiers
you find or acquire things and they are stored in your inventory
landmark is a bookmark of a place in secondlife
world menu - create landmark here
create things and set permissions to no transfer so others cannot just take them
you friend someone
search panel - how to find someone = click people tab and type name
groups (e.g. sailing community)
can create own group
search for places e.g iste - click teleport and go there
search land sales
showcase
events - like live music
classifieds for things like scripts
you can customize body shape, skin, clothing, and hair and shoes
right click on yourself and click appearance
create and save a shape
you can put all the outfit together and click make outfit button
green amount in upper right shows the money you have
there is an entire economy in second life

can learn scripting

Cross posted on Thoughts Have wings

There was so much so fast here but she does have the links to the instructions on her website at http://www.karenferrell.net/TCEA

This was all about using the randbetween function in excel to generate random numbers in a range you designate to create flashcards, graphs, ordered pairs and more.  She shows you how to use autoshapes and this function to create dice.  I will play with this some more but wanted to get the link posted.  Excel rocks!

Dare to Use Audacity Session 2 Notes
http://sites.google.com/site/daretouseaudacity/
Resources and Links all on their google site Yay!
Audacity is opensource - free - links are on their google page for downloading
Make sure you download the lame encoder so you can export as mp3s

Classroom uses (they showed several examples)
Book talks
Substitute Instructions
Speech Pathology
Create Interviews (you can do it yourself and use audacity to change one voice so it sounds like two people - historical character. book character etc)
(files can be brought into movie maker and powerpoint
record reading a textbook for student
record students reading aloud so they can hear themselves
audio book reports
book promo for library

Headphones with mics attached helped to record without picking up background noise

Sound resource freeplaymusic

demonstrated creating three tracks - two had the music and stepped down and then back up and the “speaking” track was placed so that it fell between the steps so you had music introducing, then speech, then music for the ending
Can edit out words (uh, and like)

Can add words

Audacity saves the file as a .au (this is where all the behind the scene stuff happens - do not touch this file and you can edit it later)

When complete you have to export as an mp3 or wav file

resulting mp3 can be used as background audio, podcast, embedded in a blog, imported into powerpoint or moviemaker

Technology Staff Development Strategies
Kaye Moore Hurst Euless Bedford ISD (HEB)
What they did - went from Windows 98 and Office 2000 to xp and office 2007 over the summer

Discussed the usual closed doors of staff dev
Time, schedules, childcare, reluctance to use personal time, facilily usage and software problems

Unlocking the doors

Went from face to face to techno tv
Borrowed a dedicated channel that was not being used
Instructional video each week plays all the time so teacher can access whenever
They do have “best of” weeks
Fun project weeks (before Christmas they showed teachers how to create a calendar or personalized notepads (use glue you buy and apply at the top of the pages to create notepad?)
At strategic times the broadcast can be gradebook instructions

Videos created using Camtasia

Also utilize a departmental website with instructional docs available to download - no login or password needed so things like gradebook are NOT found here

They also have HEBonline (blackboard) with online courses and curriculum info.  Constantly being updated.

Software central where manuals can be downloaded

They do an end of year video and instruction sheets for backing up to server

Podcasts and Vodcasts - ability to blog /wiki, or subscribe in itunes

Create a plan
do preliminary training with key people - instructional and support
Timeline for installation - support
timeline for training - instructional
timeline for implementation

They outsourced the training for their key people
Then, key instructional staff dev in house
Key instructional staff to use model that has been created and adjusted to train staff

Trained admin staff first

Information blitz entire district - IT staff provide 15 minute overview for every staff. vodcast available

Summer Training

Result of all this - fewer calls for help,
Requests for upgraded training

Used PDSA model
Plan Do Study Act
Plan - analyze
Did training using small steps to start controlled environment
Analyzed - what worked, what didn’t, revised and adjusted or standardized process
Check, Study results
Get buy in

I love using a Mac and have always found that most of the applications for it work almost intuitively.  The only application that I really can’t make myself like it iTunes.  I guess if I used an iPod I might be more motivated to work with it but as much as I have tried, it just seems too much like a lot of Microsoft apps in that it tries to take over and do things without you asking it to.

One of the things that aggravated me the most was that it would default to opening any media you double clicked on and not only does it open it - it copies it.  If you clicked on a video clip attached to an email it would end up with a copy in your downloads folder and a copy in iTunes.  That means that if you want to completely delete the file you have to delete it both places.  While not a huge deal it is still an extra irritating step, not to mention cluttering up your Mac.

I prefer to use Songbird which is an opensource media player that looks similar to iTunes but I usually just open audio files in VLC Player and video in Quicktime.

Today I learned that it needn’t be so! I am no longer a slave to iTunes! This may be obvious to more experienced Mac users but it’s one of those little things I didn’t know I needed to look for.

The first time you open a media file (you will need to do this for each kind - mp3, avi, whatever kind you want to open with another application instead of iTunes) - right click on the file and click get info. In the Open With section you can click the side arrows and see a list of the applications you can choose to set as default.  I use QuickTime Player for most things and then I sort files into folders the way I want to see them.  I can then have SongBird import what folders I want - you can do the same with iTunes if that is your preferred media player.

If you want to find your iTunes folders after reading this it is typically in Macintosh HD/Users/YouUserName/Music/iTunes
Your download folder is typically Macintosh HD/Users/YourUserName/Downloads

Now that you know where these things live and how to tell them where to live you can clean up your files and take control of your media.

This is also posted at Thoughts Have Wings.  Hope you found it helpful!

I read about ChaCha this morning and set my default location to well, here.  I texted for local weather report and got a message back seconds later.  You can get answers on most anything so if you have talented texters in your class - look out at test time!

You can get stock reports, answers to all kinds of questions and if you like you can even become a guide and answer other peoples’ questions.

On the road and need travel information? Here is an example:

I wonder if it has suggestions for snacks? Happy texting!

Click this link to access a form.  Fill out the form to tell me what your issue is and where you are!

PHS Support